Gun deaths? So... just mix in the accidents and the suicides. Now, personally, as you may know from previous discussions on this blog, I think suicide is murder. Morally, it should be recognized as the deliberate killing of a human being. But many people withhold moral judgment and express only sadness and sympathy. I am sympathetic when the self-killer is mentally ill, but I'm also sympathetic when those who murder others are mentally ill.

But what's with grouping self-murder and murder of others for the purposes of Slate's gun-death map? It's a great way to boost the numbers. Google statistics, and I think you'll see that in the United States, there are twice as many suicides as murders, and that proportion is also true within the category of gun deaths. Shooting oneself is the most common method of suicide.

I realize some people think that there would be less suicide if people didn't have guns at hand. But I wonder how many of the mentally disturbed/emotionally overwrought men who shoot themselves to death are self-executors — that is, persons who feel a compulsion toward violence and stop themselves. There are murderers — like Adam Lanza — who murder and then kill themselves. There is no sympathy for these suicides, yet many people think: I wish he'd killed himself first.

If he had, it probably wouldn't have made the news, but if you'd read his story, you would have reacted the way you usually do to suicide: How sad... if only he'd perceived that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem... whatever it is you usually think when you read that an isolated, bullied 20-year-old man has shot himself in the head. Would you ever think to speculate that he knew that he had an irresistible, evil impulse to gun down children, and, thank God, he had one last shred of humanity and turned the gun on himself?

Gun deaths. You can collect them on a map as faceless pins, all looking alike. It's all numbers. No individuality. What are you counting? I don't know what these pins represent. Use a different color for suicides. And which suicides are uncontrolled mental illness? Who is checking out because of uncontrolled physical pain? Identify the justified killings, done in self-defense. I want to know which ones are criminals gunning down other criminals. I'd like to think about policy with some complexity and without irrational fear mongering.

Ironically, Slate seems to want to inspire urgency about the loss of human life, but it is reducing the lives we're supposed to care so much about to a bunch of dots who matter only because they're a massive crowd. Where is the individuality? There is particularity to each death, despite the common element of the gun.

86 comments:

At some point, people have to realize that you cannot minimize risk to zero. There will always be danger, and it's best to accept that.

That means there will occasionally be horrific acts. I know that politicians who are elected promising to do something will have difficulty doing nothing, but sometimes that's the appropriate response.

The political junkie syndrome brought upon us by internet chat boards exists to serve the needs of the junkies for their several times daily dose of adrenalin and endorphins.

I have FB correspondents who post outraged rants a dozen times a day. This has become distressingly common.

This political junkie syndromes engenders the feeling of relentless crisis. That's what's really going on with this move by Slate. They are feeding the need for the junkies to get that rush brought on by daily, nee hourly, crisis.

I'm tired of the relentless push to convince us that we are always in crisis. It's phony. And, it serves the same need teenage boys are satisfying by watching those shoot and splatter video games.

Ironically, Slate seems to want to inspire urgency about the loss of human life, but it is reducing the lives we're supposed to care so much about to a bunch of dots, who matter because they're a massive crowd.

They will also include criminals shot by cops. They will publish the deaths of 18-24 year old gang-banging young men as "children". They will tell as many lies as they can get away with to further their anti-Civil Liberties agenda.

FRA statistics show 300-500 suicides per year by train. Some walk between the rails with a train approaching from behind, some throw themselves in front of or under moving trains. Quick and messy 90 percent of the time. In my opinion, SLATE and other media outlets who sensationalize these statistics could care less about the disturbed people who kill themselves by whatever means. Otherwise, why focus on guns? Liberals should show some concern for the mentally disturbed they and the ACLU turn loose into a society they can't belong to. Telling the mentally disturbed to not mix alcohol with drugs is a fools errand but I'm sure it provides comfort to the do-gooders who promote this waste of time. Whose hands is the blood really on!

There is madness in their method. If Slates's compiler of these gun death data is honest it won't be long before the clusters will show a strong correlation between gun regulation (i.e. restricted legal ownership, no carry, etc.) and gun deaths.

I predict the project will last about 18 months and then will be quietly flushed down the memory hole.

Newtown was an exceptional case. Making broad public policy decisions on exceptional cases is a bad plan. Slate's map looks to be an attempt to magnify the exception to make it appear to be the rule. Meanwhile, at the USDOJ's Firearms and Crime statistics site, it states: "According to the 1997 Survey of State Prison Inmates, among those possessing a gun, the source of the gun was from - a flea market or gun show for fewer than 2%- a retail store or pawnshop for about 12%- family, friends, a street buy, or an illegal source for 80%. During the offense that brought them to prison, 15% of State inmates and 13% of Federal inmates carried a handgun, and about 2%, a military-style semiautomatic gun.On average, State inmates possessing a firearm received sentences of 18 years, while those without a weapon had an average sentence of 12 years.Among prisoners carrying a firearm during their crime, 40% of State inmates and 56% of Federal inmates received a sentence enhancement because of the firearm."

Libruls are innumerate generally except when they stoop to use misleading data like the "160,000,000 working Americans will lose an average of $2,000 a year if we don't extend soc sec tax rate of 4.2%". As if we even have that many people working in the country! Try 125,000,000. Libruls are fascist liars even during their beloved Winter Solstice.

Yahoo had a headline the other day projecting that gun deaths would surpass vehicular deaths by the year 2016 if I remember the year correctly. Like the Slate map, which purports to show a problem, the Yahoo story purports to show its getting worse so that we must do something now before it too late, or something.

What's going to happen when Slate's maps show the horrific rate of gun deaths that Obama's sons, brothers, and uncles inflict upon one another in...gasp...places with heavy gun regulation?

Somehow, it will all be blamed on whitey, of course. Because whitey forces Darnell and Anfrenee to gun battle over "disrespect." As the wise Jew said, "Goyim kill goyim, and still they blame the Jews."

---And yet you want it legal and subsidized by the state. And when that little murderess had her baby a few months ago and took scissors to its throat and killed it after giving birth, you demanded we have sympathy for the little murderess.

Kindly take your hypocrisy and sell it to someone more gullible, baby.

"The liberal news and culture website Slate published an online map Friday that it says will show a 'daily tally of gun-deaths in America'...""... basing that tally on incidents collected by an anonymous Twitter user. The organization, however, won’t say who is behind the tweets or how reliable its data is as a statistical compilation."

---So that's how they're going to get around finding darkies at fault. It's an anonymous Twitter user. So no accountability, cherry picking deaths, with a purpose in mind: making guns seem bad, but never holding darkies up for criticism.

Slate magazine uses Wikipedia as a source for their articles. It's putrid trash. Then again, Easy Annie A. the Abortion-Lover thinks Wired and MSNBC are eliable, as do you all you little sheep, despite being proven to be false tabloid trash. So, no doubt, you'll buy anything they sell.

When they can no longer pretend something leftist is superior to what they hate---i.e. Soviet Union v. U.S., blacks v. whitey----they instead try to pretend that "everyone is the same" and that "we need to get along"---e.g. nuclear disarmament, pretending whites commit crimes at the same rate as blacks.

Whores of the internet is correct concerning atavistic minority on minority homicide rates.Look at any analysis of westerner societies' crime statistics with minority crime stats eliminated. White rates match across the board, with the exception of murder methods. In most other western countries you're more likely to be murdered with bare hands or gutted with a knife..

It might be better to examine the record of the "victims" as many shootings on criminal-on-criminal matters. Of course, most are also Black-on-Black matters, for which see Chief Justice Tanney's comments in the Dred Scott decision.

Research indicates suicide is often impulsive. A bullet to the head is a hard impulse to recover from.

12/22/12 7:23 AM

How can they tell that many suicides are done on impulse? You can't ask the ones that succeed and the ones that fail have reason to lie about it. If you say you thought about it for a long time you'll get the "why didn't you talk to me?" questions or make people close to you feel guilty for not seeing how severe the problem was.

MCT, yeah I'll be the first one to admit that I don't know the individual components of the statistics cited, or even that they're credible. My only point was that both the Slate and Yahoo articles are no more than propoganda, meant to provoke an emotional response that can be politically harnessed.

I wonder if California's high speed train (if it ever gets built) will be a suicide magnet.

I've lived now in two countries where throwing yourself in front of a train is a popular suicide method. It's a super-jerky thing to do, because it puts an emotional burden on the conductor and holds up traffic for hours.

My nephews took one of their father in laws out last night to buy a gun in Kansas City. Seem the father in law has a conceal and carry permit, but never owned a gun, Obama is quite the gun salesman.FYI, there are no more ARs left in Kansas City, not even kits and 30 round magazines are limited to 10 per costumer. There is a 5 week waiting period for AR kit availability.

I wonder how many of the "accidental" self-shootings are actually suicides that the police misreported so as to allow families to either get life insurance without any real hassle or avoid embarrassment/shame.

I saw a headline the other day that said "End Gun Violence", and I wondered, Why "gun"? Don't we want to end all violence? Suppose we ended gun violence, and it was replaced with knife violence, or axe violence, and the same number of people were violently killed; what would we have gained?

But then I realized that if you said "End Violence" no one would take you seriously. We know we can't end all violence and saying we should would make you sound like a fool.

Of course ending gun violence is just as impossible, but there are a lot of articulate people who feel that the world would be so much better if there were no guns. So what they really mean when they say "End Gun Violence" is "End Guns".

I wonder how many of the "accidental" self-shootings are actually suicides that the police misreported so as to allow families to either get life insurance without any real hassle or avoid embarrassment/shame.

---The life insurance thing is actually an urban myth. Although life insurance companies don't like to correct it (since it would probably lead to more suicides and payouts), most life insurance policies payout whether it's by suicide or otherwise.

I think this phenomenon explains the curious fact that our murder rate is several times higher than most European countries, but our overall rate of violent crimes and property crimes is usually significantly lower.

The discrepancy is particularly pronounced in the UK, which is now among the most violent places in Europe, despite a police establishment that is widely regarded to be cooking the crime statistics to try to cast politicians and racial minorities in a more favorable light. Our homicide rate is four times higher than theirs, but our rate of violent crimes is four times less, according to a recent story in the Daily Mail.

Our laws make it easy for feral young urban men to shoot each other dead over gang turf disputes, perceptions of being disrespected, and minor booze and drug-fueled squabbles related to the sexual favors of feral young urban women. Presumably the net effect on society as a whole is to remove these young men from the pool of predators plaguing the law abiding citizenry before they can commit nearly so many offenses as their counterparts in Britain.

Actually, how about some abortion regulation, since abortions are, as defined by althouse and Inga, murder.

Make third trimester abortions the equivalent of owning a machine gun. Maye we should have abortion free zones.To get an abortion you have to go through a background check.Something tells me that that would be the equivalent of a war on women and any regulation would be a violation of a fundamental right. But we're talking murder, on a scale that makes gun murders look like child's play. Owning a gun doesn't guarantee you'll kill anyone, but having an abortion does.

Ad the right to abortion isnt even in the constitution, except as a penumbra.

In 2010 there were about 31,250 gun deaths, the majority of which were actually suicides. In contrast, in 2009 there were about 120,000 abortions in New York alone.Which Inga and Althouse are defining as MURDER.If Inga wants to accept that guns need to be regulated, why shouldn't abortion e regulated, especially considering there are far more abortions than gun murders, and thus are a bigger issue when it comes to deaths of children?

ChistopherI only know from my personal experience that the friends and families of suicides "victims' knew and while devastated were not surprised. Of the four I know of, all either made their intentions known or left a letter. I think hiding the fact from the family is mostly done in the movies, hiding it from the press might be a different matter

For the loony left gun "control," i.e. removal, is the perfect issue.They do not want guns of any kind anyway, so for them it is no loss involved, and the opposition cannot imagine a world without guns, and if there were, they would not want to live in it.

So it is a straight up "are you with us or against us?" issue with no reason or possible compromise involved, which is exactly what they revel in.

I think this phenomenon explains the curious fact that our murder rate is several times higher than most European countries, but our overall rate of violent crimes and property crimes is usually significantly lower.

The discrepancy is particularly pronounced in the UK, which is now among the most violent places in Europe, despite a police establishment that is widely regarded to be cooking the crime statistics to try to cast politicians and racial minorities in a more favorable light. Our homicide rate is four times higher than theirs, but our rate of violent crimes is four times less, according to a recent story in the Daily Mail.

Our laws make it easy for feral young urban men to shoot each other dead over gang turf disputes, perceptions of being disrespected, and minor booze and drug-fueled squabbles related to the sexual favors of feral young urban women. Presumably the net effect on society as a whole is to remove these young men from the pool of predators plaguing the law abiding citizenry before they can commit nearly so many offenses as their counterparts in Britain.

From a purely utilitarian point of view, is this such a bad thing?

---It wouldn't be so bad if the following were also true:

1) this were publicly acknowledged and supported by Tv and movies;

2) we didn't have programs that blamed such behavior on whitey, and then forcibly integrated such cretins with civilized people;

3) people were allowed to keep such people from their homes and businesses.

Lefties have made sure that all three are removed.

Remember, folks: Jim Crow happened for a reason, and "whitey is an evil racist" wasn't it.

Um,The Daily Mail reports quotes several of Adam's former classmates to the effect that his problems got much worse after the separation. "He was always weird but the divorce affected him. He was arguing with his mother. He was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode."

No, its not a myth. Whores may be right but for the wrong reasons. Life insurance generally has a suicide clause which states that it will not pay out for suicide for the first two years or so. The theory being that one does not plan their suicide years in advance. If insurers routinely pay out for suicide, its because the lion's share of such policies are beyond the two year limit.

When an 80+ year old driver, facing the reality of not being able to care for himself, or herself, much longer, hits a bridge abutment or has a head-on with an 18-wheeler, etc., was it suicide or an accident?Who can tell?

I predict thick concentrations of dots in Dem-dominated urban areas which have the most strict gun control laws.

This the basic problem - the map is bad for the left not only because most of the deaths are in Dem-dominated urban areas, but also because those urban areas are much more densely populated. The gun deaths in Chicago are likely to outnumber those in a number of the western states with strong gun cultures, combined, based on population alone, even ignoring the higher per-capita rate. And, for a lot of the country, this is more a comment on the breakdown of the liberal urban ideal than any condemnation of gun policy. If you are much more likely to die from gun violence in the biggest cities, why live there and raise your family? Which, indirectly, means that a lot of other liberal ideals need to be reevaluated - such as mass transit, a waste of money for much of the country. Drill Baby, Drill.

MarkD said...I'd like to see the deaths from the war on drugs separated from the rest. Don't forget to include the three hundred Mexicans whose blood is on hands belonging to this administration

If you look at the FBIs uniform crime statistics you'll find that if you're not a gang member or hang out where there are gangs you're actually safer from violent crime than if you lived in almost any city in Great Britain.Almost half of all deaths by firearms are gang related.

Professor you have an annoying habit of wanting to think. Thank God most people aren't like you.Do you understand how frustrating thinking people can be for folks who are just trying to do something meaningful?You're not helping, ma'am. Not at all.

Speaking of thinking and suicide by firearms, here's David Foster Wallace on the subject:“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many cliches, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

Having your nuts bit off by a Laplander is death by misadventure.After all, they say adventure begins when things start to go wrong. If a Laplander is snapping at your nuts, something is wrong and you must act or perish.

Effective risk management begins with a comprehensive characterization of the problem. We cannot properly assess the mitigating value of proactive (i.e. deterrent) and reactive (i.e. citizen "soldiers") elements until we review both their positive and negative contributions.

Now that's sensible. I heart that like my cartoon heart comes flying out and pounds outside my chest then grabs you affectionately.

I do hear popping sounds downtown and at night for which I cannot account. But conversely, just yesterday I was thinking, "Damn, this alley is spotless! That street sweeper must be all clogged with Saturday night specials."

Even though it's dishonest, I don't actually mind them mixing in accidental shootings--the numbers are too low to materially affect anything, and it's a great in debates to be able to say, "Oh, and I see you mixed the numbers for accidental shootings in with intentional ones--why did you do that?"